What is Litecoin?

Litecoin went live on October 13, 2011 and is a fork of Bitcoin, which means that the coin originates from the same Bitcoin blockchain. It is founded by Charlie Lee who had the vision to create a lighter version of Bitcoin to use as actual payment solution.

People often compare Bitcoin to“gold”, and see it as a long-term store of value, while Litecoin can be seen as“silver” and as a means of transaction for everyday purposes.

Consensus mechanism

A fundamental difference between the Litecoin and Bitcoin is their mining protocol: "Proof-of-Work". As we have explained in the Bitcoin article, Proof-of-Work enables“miners” to provide computational power to the Bitcoin or Litecoin network in order to solve extremely hard cryptographic puzzles.

When a solution to the puzzle is found by a miner he or she receives a reward in the form of Bitcoin or Litecoin. As long as the collective computational power of the network is stronger than one single entity, the blockchain cannot be manipulated. The big difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin is that they use different methods(hashing algorithms) to achieve this Proof-of-Work.